This Translation Tuesday, we present a fairy tale encounter amid dark signs of a war’s beginning, elegantly entwined and counterposed by Jadd Hilal. The lonely Adel discovers two improbable creatures in his wardrobe, and they become his first real friends. In the outside world, meanwhile, something horrible is unfolding: school is cancelled, the local protests are turning ugly, shots ring out at night, and militias have begun to roam the streets.
We reproduce here a note from Hilal’s translator, Bryan Flavin, who tells us more about the author and his work.
A note from the translator:
L’Orient du Jour described A Bathtub in the Desert, Jadd Hilal’s acclaimed second novel, as “The Other Little Prince…[its] endearing narrator reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry.” Yet while Saint-Exupéry and Hilal both confront the expectations assigned to childhood and adulthood, Hilal does so within a different context, one of war and exile:
When war breaks out, Adel’s life changes forever. Fortunately he still has his two giant imaginary insect friends, Darwin and Tardigrade, to help him escape. Strained to make decisions beyond his maturity, Adel finds himself at a desert outpost where the combatants act like children, and the sheikh, leader of the outpost, forces him to grow up. Throughout, Adel must learn what it means to be an adult, traversing war and exile, friendship and isolation, innocence and identity.
With emotion and stylistic minimalism, the novel challenges the typical Bildungsroman in two ways: 1) it asks readers to re-examine and contextualize the biases surrounding childhood and adulthood; and 2) it subverts the Bildungsroman’s gradual trajectory, instead marked by Adel’s navigation of traumatic experience. The following translation is an excerpt, starting when Adel first meets Darwin and ending right before the start of the war.
A Bathtub in the Desert
When I say I didn’t have any real friends, that’s not entirely true—I did have one friend: my giant beetle. He appeared the night my parents announced their divorce. I still remember that night—I opened the door to my massive wardrobe and found him there, next to the toy plane my father had given me for my third birthday, the dozens of stones I’d collected on the roads, and the cardboard box decorated with lentils I’d made for my mother at school, along with a number of other memories.
I should say, I only ever used my wardrobe for this—for keeping memories. I had convinced my parents to buy me a dresser for my clothes, but in exchange, I had to give up my large jar filled with the Chiclets I used to collect. Not a bad deal. Besides, I ended up needing the space. Without it, I would’ve missed out on my very first friend.
Even though he was definitely a beetle, the thing that made me slam the wardrobe shut and rush back to my bed—the thing I forgot to mention—he was as big and as tall as a grown-up.
“Who are you?”
I remember fumbling back to the wardrobe door and opening it. He was still there.
“What do you want?”
He didn’t speak, but his eyes told me he was scared. Now that I think of it—he didn’t really look like a beetle at all. Instead of tiny little legs, he had two long ones, like us. He wore midnight blue dress pants with white pinstripes and white polished shoes. Above that: nothing. All black with only a pair of eyes at the very top. Blue eyes with wrinkles around the corners. As if he were smiling.
“Tell me why you’re here!”
He jumped with surprise and then slowly turned his back to me, trying to hide. His shell was gigantic and green, with glints of bronze, copper, and gold.
“What’s your name?”
He didn’t dare face me.
“Do you know how to speak?”
Nothing.
“But you understand me, right?”
He nodded. I thought about what my father had told me earlier that day.
“I’m going to call you Darwin.”
My father told me about a scientist who said that beetles were a species that had outlived many others.
“Does that mean they’re the strongest, Baba?”
“No, Adel. It means they adapted.”
My father knew a whole bunch of things. He said it was because of his travels. He was always up in his airplane, which was always up in the clouds. I almost never saw my father in person, but he’d send me postcards. In the photos, he was always wearing a light blue shirt embroidered with birds. He had long, smooth hair and round glasses. He’d forget to call me most of the time, but when he did remember, he’d start every conversation the same way:
“Hey, there isn’t a plane stuck in that hair of yours, right?”
He wanted me to get a haircut. One time he said my hair was so long and curly that a plane could survive a crash-landing inside it.
I also loved balancing on sidewalk curbs. Darwin would help me even though he didn’t have arms, nudging me with his shell to help me stay level. It must have been funny, watching him run from side to side like that.
One day, I was late to class because I spent too much time playing tightrope walker on the way to school. They called my mother to tell her what happened, and when I got home that day, she punished me with her weapon of choice: guilt.
“We’ve given you an education, blown a fortune on feeding you, wasted hours and hours comforting you because your father’s away and you don’t have any friends—after everything we’ve done for you, and now this? This is where we end up? Late because you’re frolicking around with an insect that doesn’t even exist? I don’t want to hear you talk about this Darwin ever again, got it?”
***
Besides telling me my hair was too long, my father wasn’t very observant. He was always elsewhere. Like the day I confessed to him about being late to school, he told me to keep up the good work.
“It’s important you stay on track like you have been.”
As for my mother, she blamed me for all the misery in the world. So much so that I promised myself to never play tightrope walker on the way to school again. Darwin was understanding, thankfully. Actually, I think he was happy about it—it must have been exhausting for him, hopping back and forth like that.
I’d make it to school on time walking at a good pace. Sometimes, I even got there ahead of time, like one time when I arrived a whole twenty minutes early. I sat on the steps leading to the metal front gate and waited. Darwin looked at me, then spun around to investigate the playground behind the bars. All I could see was his large shell. He turned back after a moment and tilted his head toward my watch.
“So what?”
He lifted one of his legs and pointed toward the playground.
“Yeah, you’re right Darwin. It is a bit weird.”
The school was empty, even though it was almost time for the bell to ring. I called my mother, who said that school was cancelled. That the protests in town were getting worse.
That night, I met a new friend. It was almost like with Darwin, except this time, I didn’t jump back scared when opening the wardrobe door.
It was another insect. He must have been around my height, so a little over four feet. He looked like a fat vacuum cleaner bag with six little legs fidgeting out. His face—if you can even call it that—was the same color as Darwin’s suit, midnight blue. And so was the rest of his body. Enormous eyebrows drooped over his black pupils, which made them look tiny. He had a bushy moustache, and below that, his mouth looked like a sort of lug nut. It was strange, because even though the lug nut wasn’t moving, there were words coming out of it. A whole bunch of words.
“Well how are you there Darwin, my dear old friend? Oh, how happy I am to cross your path! You know, it was only yesterday I was thinking of you, wondering to myself if that Darwin was still an insect of few words. Well now, it would appear I have my answer!”
Darwin nodded his head next to me, eyes smiling. The other insect leaned on his cane and let out a strong laugh.
“What a coincidence! Truly!”
The two seemed to know each other quite well.
“And who might this be, the fine young man with green eyes and tousled hair?”
I approached him.
“I’m Adel.”
“A pleasure it is to meet you! My name is Tardigrade. What a magnificent day it is, wouldn’t you say?”
“Day? But it’s nightti—”
“Do you have any plans for tomorrow, Adel?”
“I don’t know. The school’s shut down.”
“Ah yes, of course. What a shame… a true shame how a town breaks apart when outsiders poke their noses in our protests, don’t you agree?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“My dear Adel, there’s one little thing. A tiny little thing. You see, I’m lonely. I’m a bit too sturdy of an insect to have any real friends. They’re born and they die, they’re born and they die, but as for me, I always remain.”
“I—”
“I would be absolutely delighted if you would let me stay with you.”
“Stay with me!”
It was already a miracle my mother and father hadn’t caught on to my monologues with Darwin.
“You aren’t very discreet, Tardigrade.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Well, you’re a bit loud, you know. I could get in trouble talking to you if you keep it up. My parents won’t understand.”
“Oh, well if that’s the only thing, I’ll be as quiet as the desert!”
“You would change just like that? For me?”
“For you?”
He approached me and leaned into my ear.
“We only ever change for ourselves, Adel.”
We moved into a smaller apartment a week later. The town was getting less clean, less safe. At night you could regularly hear bullets and police sirens, but that wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was that in our new apartment, there wasn’t a bathtub.
One morning, my mother got a call from Téta, my grandmother. She had fallen off her stool while dusting for cobwebs and couldn’t move her leg. My mother hung up and immediately called our neighbor Mansour to ask her to come keep an eye on me.
“She’ll be here in five minutes, okay? I’ll be back in a wink.”
I didn’t understand why she was telling me all this. I was used to being left alone. It didn’t scare me. As a matter of fact, I was ecstatic! Five minutes! Five whole minutes I could play with Tardigrade and Darwin without worrying they’d be seen!
My mother called me an hour later.
“Adel, listen. The militias are patrolling Téta’s street. I’m blocked in.”
“Mansour never came.”
“Shu? Why not?”
“When are you coming back, Mom?”
It was getting darker outside, the bullets in the distance growing louder. My mother’s voice was cut off. I stood there, my mouth wide open.
Tardigrade straightened his shoulders.
“We’ll protect you, Adel! If those lowlifes try to come in here, Darwin and I will set them straight!”
Darwin bent his legs and shot me a stern look, as if to make himself look tough as nails. The office phone rang.
“Adel, can you hear me?”
“Baba?”
“My boy, there isn’t a plane stuck in your hair! Oh, thank god!”
“Baba. It’s the war, isn’t it?”
My father seemed to hesitate.
“You have to stay strong, Adel. It’s in times like these that—”
Suddenly, everything went dark. Tardigrade came into the office.
“The electricity. It’s been shut off.”
I called my mother on my cellphone. Nothing. I ran to the kitchen. Tardigrade and Darwin followed. My father called but I didn’t answer. Too panicked. I lit a candle and stood in front of it. Petrified. After a few minutes, I managed to sit. Then I lied down, curled up trembling on the kitchen tile. Darwin approached, crouched down beside me, and reassured me with his soft eyes. Then he gently leaned in to cover me with his shell.
Translated from the French by Bryan Flavin
Jadd Hilal was born in 1987 outside Geneva. He studied humanities and Anglophone literature in France before living in Scotland and then Switzerland. Hilal holds a doctorate and currently resides in Paris, where he teaches literature at a high school in the Parisian suburbs. He is the author of three novels: Des ailes au loin (Éditions Elyzad, 2018), which won the Grand Prix du Roman Métis, the Prix Métis des Lycéens, and the Prix de la Première Œuvre Littéraire Francophone; Une baignoire dans le désert (Éditions Elyzad, 2020), which won the Prix des Lycéens et Apprentis d’Île-de-France; and mostly recently Le caprice de vivre (Éditions Elyzad, 2023).
Bryan Flavin is a writer and literary translator from French and Arabic. He is a graduate of the M.F.A. in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa, and his writing and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Tupelo Quarterly, and Waxwing, among others. He currently resides in New York and works as a copy editor.
***
Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog: